Sunday, July 31, 2011

The U.S. Senate failed to pass Majority Leader Harry Reid’s measure that would have raised the debt limit. Although they commanded a majority, Senate Democrats lacked the 60 votes necessary for a procedural vote to end a Republican filibuster. However, a compromise was reportedly later reached that will allow both houses to agree, and thus prevent a default before Tuesday’s deadline.

In other news, two Muslim teenagers in London pleaded guilty to criminal damage for spray-painting burkas on sexy models in advertising posters.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Egghead, Fjordman, Gaia, Insubria, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Comments are still closed.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

That’s the question that naturally arises when one compares the number of references to Naomi Klein in the killer’s manifesto with those for Mark Steyn. Obviously, Anders Behring Breivik was inspired by the Left, and not the Right.

Hah.

Here’s an interesting take from Canada on that topic and related matters:

In the wake of the Oslo atrocities, our Austrian correspondent AMT has sifted the punditry of the local media to produce an outline of the new campaign against “hate preachers” now building in Austria.

Thoughts on the Massacre in Norway and its Aftermath

by AMT

The crap-o-meter has reached truly epic heights in the nine days since the atrocities in Oslo and on Utøya island. The following is a round-up from an Austrian perspective, in no particular order.

When the attacks became public, everyone immediately blamed some fringe group of Misunderstanders of Islam. In fact, an Islamic group or two started celebrations of their own. A stark reminder of the 9/11 attacks, after which the not-yet-“Islam-is-a-Religion-of-Peace”-infected TV crews found thousands of Muslims dancing in the streets praising Allah.

But that scenario was not to be. Tragically (deaths caused by representatives of the Religion of Peace are not tragic?), the accused perpetrator turned out to be what the European MSM and the European Union have “always” known to be the most dangerous part of the political spectrum: the right wing, with its extremism, anti-Muslim sentiment, anti-EU sentiment. A witch-hunt such as never seen before began. The media and dependent caste of politicians were found at the forefront.

In Austria, chancellor Faymann (SPÖ) and vice-chancellor Spindelegger (ÖVP) sat down for a double-page interview in Kurier in full agreement that hate preachers must be stopped and a charter against hate speech should be discussed and later adopted, echoing demands made by the Greens party. The ministers of justice and interior chimed in that there should be even more data collection on the internet in order to prevent future attacks. In addition, those who approve of terrorist acts (what is the definition of such an act?) should be prosecuted. The chairman of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Prevention of Terrorism asked for more legal power to catch those responsible for future attacks. These are truly frightening prospects.

In line with the search for “ideological” supporters of Anders Behring Breivik, the media tried hard to hunt down supporters of the Counterjihad network, which until last week was largely unknown, and now all of a sudden was reputed to be the most dangerous network around.

Never mind Al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Hizb-ut-Tahrir: a group of known and unknown individuals who champion free speech, the rule of law, democracy, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (as opposed to the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam) are currently a threat to—— to whom or what exactly? A group of people that includes a Danish man of Iranian descent who says the following:

Many of our regular readers who were on holiday during the horrific events of July 22nd came back to their normal routine to find the Western world — at least the European part of it — much changed. They have been writing to ask us about our now-closed comments section, and when things might return to “normal”.

To our loyal readers and commenters we must sadly say that things have changed irrevocably. They will never be the same.

This doesn’t mean the comments won’t return. It does mean we must wait until the Gawkers and Creeps and Finger-Pointing-Blamers wander away — i.e., when some new horror or titillation grabs their attention. Think of this phenomenon as part of the same ugly human tendency which impels people to gather at the scene of a road accident. Except this wasn’t an accident: the monster fingered those he wanted destroyed and the mainstream media is simply carrying out his orders. Had he cut-and-pasted his derivative thinking from the Antifas, do you suppose this ratcheting up of their attacks would’ve occurred? The Antifas promote violence and lawlessness in the name of the European state socialist establishment.

ABB, or those he worked with, set about to systematically wreck the efforts of the small, diverse and mostly obscure group of conservative bloggers and writers primarily in America and Britain. It is ludicrous to assign blame based on a barbarian’s “research”, but that is exactly what the Left must needs do; it has no choice. When the prospect of accepting responsibility for what your culture produces is too terrifying, then you must quickly find scapegoats to relieve your own anxiety. Our readers know this; it’s a phenomenon we’ve been discussing for a long time.

[To strangers who’ve arrived here out of breath, pick and shovel in hand to dig through our material looking for ways to blame others — and good luck with that — you have almost ten thousand essays through which you must wade. Given that you arrive as judge and jury rather than someone attempting to understand, I’m sure you’ll find whatever it is you need to believe about us.]

Again, to our regular readers and commenters: at the moment, the sheer level of hits on our site meter (frequently running at ten times their usual rate) dictates the wisdom of closing GoV comments for the interim. When our traffic drops back close to its usual modest number of readers, then we’ll re-open the comments section.

As the Baron told me today,

We have now been publicly identified by innumerable mass media outlets as one of the two primary inspirations for the Norwegian mass murderer. As a result, we are currently in the crosshairs of numerous groups who would love to destroy us. We no longer have the luxury of letting commenters say pretty much whatever they want, because their indiscretion or hyperbole could provide the excuse for shutting us down.

With the imposition of the EU “Constitution” on member states, free speech among the citizens of that sad failure is greatly imperiled. The elites have granted you the right to say and think whatever they approve. The idea that free speech is inherent in the dignity of the individual is being systematically destroyed in favor of the collective mind, a collective whose rules are written by the oligarchs currently in power in the EU.

You are no longer permitted to live and move and have your being outside their pre-approved strictures. Many of our European friends are understandably scared for themselves and for their countries. I can’t say that I blame them. The boundaries of their homelands are blurring, the doors out of the gilded cage of the nanny state are quietly closing, one by one.

We grieve with you. We see our own Gramscians attempting the same thing in our country, too. Will they win? It’s hard to say at this point. The Founding Ideals, of free speech and individual dignity, are under fierce attack here also.

Despite all this, posting will proceed as usual. We didn’t flinch from the truth before all this happened, and we won’t hold back now.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I appear to have digressed from the task of explaining the possible future of comments on Gates of Vienna. However, my point is to provide context and background for the coming change. With that brief summary done, let me explain what is likely to happen:

Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo was arrested on July 27th for possession of explosive materials, in what was apparently an attempted attack on Fort Hood. Upon leaving court, Pfc. Abdo explicitly referred to the murderous attack by Maj. Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood two years ago.

A few days ago I heard a news announcer refer to the fact that Pfc. Abdo had had “Islamic terrorist materials” in his possession. That particular media outlet had obviously failed to receive the policy memo warning against the use of the word “terrorist”, especially in conjunction with the words “Islamic” or “Muslim”.

No one in the federal government or the Pentagon would have made the same mistake — the protocol forbidding the use of “terrorist” and “Islamic” is in effect at all levels. The preferred phrase would have been “extremist materials”.

In the Fox News report below, one of Naser Abdo’s fellow soldiers is interviewed about the warning signs displayed by the accused “extremist”. Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

Saturday, July 30, 2011

The U.S. Senate delayed a vote on raising the debt ceiling until 1 pm tomorrow (Sunday July 31). Observers believe that this signifies that a compromise is in the works that will avert a default before the deadline is reached on August 2.

In other news, militants have once again attacked the natural gas pipeline between Egypt and Israel, launching a grenade assault on the terminal in the Sinai.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Frontinus, Insubria, JD, JP, Mary Abdelmassih, Nilk, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

To wrap up Poetry Day, for a change of pace here is an excerpt from a poem by the 19th-century German romantic poet Theodore Fontane. The original German is followed by a translation of the same lines by our Austrian correspondent Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

Consider this a protest against al the lies that are flying around the MSM and internet these days about what we do, and what we say, and what we stand for:

I believe in truth.To look for her, to search for her within us and around us must be our highest purpose. In that, we serve first and foremost yesterday and today.Without truth there is no security and no continuity.Be not afraid when the pack starts to scream and shout. For nothing in this world is more hated and feared than the truth.Nevertheless, at the end of the day, any opposition to the truth will crumble like the night in the face of daybreak.

The following article about Anders Behring Breivik appeared today in Aftonbladet, a major Socialist newspaper in Sweden. Many thanks to our Swedish correspondent LN for his heroic exertions in translating it, and to Steen of Snaphanen for helping me figure out the difficult sections.

Regular readers of Gates of Vienna will notice that once we get past the author’s sneering tone and obvious distaste for conservatives, his descriptions of the political opinions held by the Counterjihad are not particularly inaccurate. In fact, that’s one of the disturbing things about Anders Breivik — when simply voicing his opinions, he sounded a lot like normal, non-violent people who oppose the Islamization of the West. And this is not all that surprising, given that he plagiarized quite a number of us for his manifesto, but it’s still disconcerting to read about it.

Prof. Gardell’s view of the Right in the USA is somewhat more peculiar. His description of “Ku Klux Klan-style American patriotism” — which he says was the norm here until the 1980s — does not describe an America I recognize. I was here at the time, but maybe I missed all that somehow. I’ll leave it to the reader to judge the accuracy of that part of his account.

The goal of the Swedish Left is, of course, to use Mr. Breivik and the Norway massacre to discredit the Sweden Democrats, marginalize anti-jihad activists, and squelch any form of nationalist resistance to the multicultural project in Sweden and throughout the rest of Europe.

Remember: to the Left, Breivik’s opinions and our own are identical. I categorically reject the assertion that violence is inherent in what we say, but that view is widely held among the Progressives and Multiculturalists of the West.

Mattias Gardell examines Anders Breivik’s world of ideas

“As Righteous Knight you are the jury, judge, and executioner on behalf of all free Europeans,” says the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik in his manifesto 2083.

“It is better to kill too many than not killing enough”, because “the time for dialogue is over” and “time for armed resistance has come.” The terrorist attack in Oslo was not irrational madness but a calculated political assassination. The carnage was a manifestation of a certain logic that can and should be explained, if we want to avoid a repetition. “Our shock attacks are theater and theater is always performed before an audience,” writes Breivik. The self-appointed knight gave himself the stage name Sigurd — Crusaders and had prepared himself by sending out his manifesto to thousands of recipients in the Islamophobic environment, posting a quick message on YouTube, and providing the world’s journalists with promotional pictures of himself, which he easily constructed featuring himself in captivating poses, dressed in formal uniform or combat gear. When Breivik is brought to justice, he is remarkably happy. Newspapers and television have willingly released his promo pictures, his YouTube movie has been downloaded thousands of times, the manifesto has been translated into various languages, and hundreds of anti-Muslim websites and Internet users look to spread it further.

The attacks were carried out, therefore, by a man of faith, which he shares with the political environment of which he is a product, an environment which he hopes to steer into an even more violent path. Let’s step into the world of Breivik’s ideas by reviewing his extensive manifesto in 2083, named after the year of the attack in which the man imagines that the goal must be achieved: a mono-cultural Christian Europe without Muslims and traitors.

It has been pointed out that the work is largely a concoction of texts, whose authors are not always listed, which is true. It does not make 2083 less interesting, because it gives us the ability to track his library. By reading what Breivik reads, we gain entry into his thinking. Thus, we are better equipped to recognize such thought when it pops up elsewhere in today’s public speeches.

The day after the attacks revealed Hans Rustad, initiator of the Norwegian anti-Muslim forum Document.no where Breivik has been a frequent participant; that large parts of 2083 were copied from the Unabomber Manifesto, published in 1995 by anti-modernist and technology-critic Ted Kaczynski, who conducted a series of 16 bomb attacks on universities and airlines.

Johan Lundberg, chief editor of Axess, transformed that information into the very core of Breivik’s ideology, and the news was cabled into the thought of supposedly respectable anti-Muslim circles. Is the claim true? No. Three (3) of the 1516 pages are taken from the Unabomber Manifesto, from a section where Kaczynski attacks the Left. The rest comes from elsewhere. Looking at Breivik’s main influences, four influential idea streams may be identified: contemporary Islamophobic thought and culture, conservative traditions, elements of modern White Power ideology, and anti-feminism, all framed by a distinctly romantic masculine warrior ideal.

The leitmotiv is Islamophobia. Breivik draws his material from the American anti-Muslim writers Robert Spencer, Gregory M. Davis, Andrew Bostom, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes, the British conspiracy theorist Bat Ye’or (Gisèle Littman), the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, the Flemish nationalist Koenraad Elst, and the Norwegian anti-Muslim who writes under the pseudonym Fjordman, whose thinking was marketed in Sweden by, among others, SD’s Kent Ekeroth and Jimmie Åkesson.

As we reported yesterday, the “day of unity” in Cairo did not turn out as planned. After allying with the secular democratic groups for the purpose of demonstrating in Tahrir Square, the Islamic fundamentalists — who outnumbered the secular groups — took over the demo and shoved the others aside. The secularists eventually withdrew, leaving the protest entirely to the Salafists.

By long-established custom, Saturday is either Ranting Day or Poetry Day here at Gates of Vienna. This past week’s events have left me too worn out to rant, so poetry will have to do.

A few days ago, just as the flood of media fury surrounding this blog crested, the following poem by Robert Graves came into my mind. It seemed to have relevance to our current situation.

The phrase “Eleusinian ambrosia” in the penultimate line is a reference to the potion drunk by initiates at the Greater Eleusinian Mysteries at the culmination of the festival of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis.

The concision and economy of diction in this poem lend it a lambent clarity:

As When the Mysticby Robert Graves

To be lost for good to the gay self-esteemThat carried him through difficult years of childhood,To be well-stripped of all tattered ambitionsBy his own judgement, now scorning himselfAs past redemption — this is anticipationOf true felicity, as when the mysticStarved, frightened, purged, assaulted and ignobledDrinks Eleusinian ambrosiaFrom a gold cup and walks in Paradise.

Friday, July 29, 2011

The U.S. House of Representatives finally passed a bill that permits the raising of the debt limit and provides for modest spending reductions. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the bill will be dead when it gets to the Senate, and President Obama promises to veto it, anyway. So default is still just four days away.

In other news, according to intelligence sources in Belarus, Anders Behring Breivik received paramilitary training earlier this year at a secret camp in Belarus.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, Fjordman, Gaia, Insubria, JP, Nilk, Srdja Trifkovic, TV, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

In case anyone was wondering whether the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC, the body formerly known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference) was going to take advantage of last week’s massacre in Norway, the suspense is gone. The latest interview with OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu demonstrates that the OIC intends to exploit the killing fields of Utøya for strategic purposes as part of its ten-year struggle against “Islamophobia”.

The chief of the world’s largest Muslim body has said the Norway massacre and blast that left at least 76 dead and dozens injured is only “the tip of the iceberg,” warning that the incident is the latest product of rampantly rising extremist political movement sweeping across Europe.

Ekmelledin İhsanoğlu, secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) told Today’s Zaman in an interview that growing animosity toward Islam in Europe in the past few years needs to be analyzed in order to decipher last week’s Norway massacre. Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik has admitted that he set off a car bomb in the government district of Oslo, killing at least eight people, then drove several miles northwest of the Norwegian capital to an island where the youth wing of the ruling Labor Party was holding its annual summer camp.

He arrived at Utøya Island posing as a police officer, then opened fire on scores of unsuspecting youth, executing them one after another as they tried to flee into the water. Sixty-eight people died, many of them teenagers.

İhsanoğlu said that before the incident on July 22 the Western world always either had a difficult time understanding or did not want to understand the phenomenon of growing Islamophobia. Giving credit to the organization he leads, İhsanoğlu said he has been very aware of this issue since he assumed his position in 2005. He said a series of major events revealing anti-Islamic sentiments afoot in Europe began with the infamous cartoon crisis.

A Danish daily published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2006 that led to a crisis between European nations and the Muslim world. Muslims across the world staged protests, sometimes violently attacking the embassies of Western countries, which defended the cartoonist’s freedom of speech.

İhsanoğlu said a great deal of what he had to deal with at the outset of his job as a secretary-general was related to this “insulting” issue. He said many senior European officials accused Muslims of trying to restrict freedom of speech, alleging that the outrage among Muslims was a result of their “extreme sensitivity” and that it is acceptable to draw cartoons of anyone.

He said his organization was unable to persuade Europeans that it is animosity against Islam which is on rise, despite repeated calls. But he said by time this issue began to be debated, similar incidents had begun slowly increasing, and the OIC introduced this matter at the United Nations General Assembly and its human rights agency. He said they OIC was also successful in pushing for UN endorsement of several decisions related to defamation of religion. He said these resolutions, adopted at the United Nations Human Rights Council in March of this year, were in support of OIC’s viewpoints.

İhsanoğlu added that these decisions were challenged by European nations, who argued that they are one-sided and restrict freedom of speech. He said the language of the statements was then changed to avoid bias, by specifying “religions and faiths” rather than “religion or faith.”

European countries have been under fire for overlooking right-wing terrorism threats, while devoting much of their resources to Islamist threats, despite a sharp decline in the number of such attacks. In the wake of Norway’s terrorist attack, the European police agency Europol established a task force of more than 50 experts to help investigate non-Islamist terrorist threats in Scandinavian countries. Europe has seen an overall increase in xenophobia, boosting the ranks of ultranationalists and fueling their activity.

In contrast, Europol’s 2011 terrorism watch report, released in April of this year, stated that Islamist terrorists carried out only three attacks on EU territory in 2010, while separatist groups, on the other hand, were responsible for 160 attacks and left-wing and anarchist groups were responsible for 45 attacks.

İhsanoğlu said the Norway massacre is very thought-provoking, when we consider that Breivik had no tolerance for Muslims or for those who are tolerant of Muslims.

The Secretary-General then reminds us that just a week before the killings in Norway, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed herself in full agreement with the OIC’s position:

The Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels sends this brief examination of the real inspiration for last week’s massacre in Norway.

Breivik: Inspired by Al Qaeda, Not Gates of Viennaby Nicolai Sennels

Anders Breivik, the accused Norwegian mass murderer, claims that he found inspiration for his massacre in blogs focusing on Islam and Muslim immigration.

He did not. Breivik found inspiration in his own wretched interpretation of these blogs’ messages. Contrary to the Quran, for example, these blogs promote democracy and human rights, not murder and violent world revolution.

Breivik’s true inspiration is clear to everyone: The Lashkar-e-Taiba attack in Mumbai and Al-Qaeda’s massacres around the world. No wonder that so many newspapers initially stated that Norway had been hit by Islamists. And no wonder that Islamists were the only ones to call the tragedy “good news”.

Breivik’s interpretation of the Islam-critical blogs that he mentions in his manifesto is just as subjective and just as much a misunderstanding as the democratic and peaceful Muslims’ interpretation of their own religion.

Nicolai Sennels is a psychologist and the author of “Among Criminal Muslims: A Psychologist’s experiences with the Copenhagen Municipality”.

Today’s demonstration in Cairo was billed as a great “day of unity” for Egypt’s various protest groups. Islamic fundamentalists and secular groups had supposedly cut a deal to put aside their differences and come together in a common struggle against the military government.

According to this report from Russia Today, however, things didn’t work out quite as planned. Although the anger and violence were directed against the military, tensiona arose between the Salafist groups and the secular democrats among the demonstrators:

The English writer and former UKIP parliamentary candidate Paul Weston weighs in on the state of the BBC, as evidenced by the treatment of Tommy Robinson by Jeremy Paxman on a recent Newsnight program.

The BBC, Breivik, the EDL and Islamby Paul Weston

The BBC regards itself as a politically impartial organisation, but their behaviour in the fallout of the Breivik atrocity shows them to be nothing other than the unapologetic propaganda arm of the hard Left and Islam.

There are atrocities and there are lesser atrocities in the peculiar thinking of BBC executives. After 9/11 they went to positively surreal lengths to disassociate Islam from terrorism. They publicly asked what we had done wrong to arouse such animosity and scoured the length and breadth of Britain to produce Muslims who would denounce the airliner attacks as terrible yes, but Islamic? No, no and no again.

Just two days after 9/11 those decidedly un-impartial bosses at the BBC contrived to fill a Question Time audience with a large number of handpicked haters of America who reduced Philip Lader, former United States ambassador to the Court of St. James, to tears as they chanted anti-American slogans while the BBC moderator remained outwardly impassive, but inwardly exultant.

Much the same happened after the Islamic transport bombings in London on 7 and 21 July 2005. Question Time was again the culprit, but this time they filled the audience with Muslims in numbers totally unrepresentative of their population share, or as the BBC so disingenuously put it:

“In order to ensure a range of voices on these issues, the studio audience contained a higher proportion of Muslims in the audience than in the population as a whole — around 15% — but the rest of the audience — around 85% — included representatives of a number of other different ethnic and religious groups, including Christian, Hindu, Sikh, African Caribbean, English, Irish, Kashmiri and Turkish.”

Although we should perhaps be grateful that a handful of English people and Christians were even allowed into the BBC studio, it seems clear that the purpose of the exercise was to excuse Islam for actions carried out in the name of Islam, whilst shutting down any robust criticism by making sure any potential critics were numerically outnumbered by a hostile majority.

This brings us to their rather different attitude in the wake of the Norway terrorist attack where the perpetrator — as described ad infinitum by the BBC — was a blue-eyed, blond-haired, right-wing Conservative/Christian fundamentalist. BBC newsreader Kate Silverton went the extra mile in ensuring a Norwegian interviewee repeated the word “Nazi” three times in his description of the physical looks of Breivik — just to make sure we all fully understood her subliminal point.

To the BBC, the EDL are the Nazis reborn and thus just waiting for any old excuse to go on a murderous rampage against all the non-Aryans in their midst. How they must have salivated at the thought of getting EDL leader Tommy Robinson onto Newsnight, where the poor little lamb would be soundly taken apart and exposed by their Attack-Dog-In-Chief, Mr Jeremy Paxman.

Unfortunately for the BBC, that turned out not be the case (see video courtesy of Vlad Tepes blog). Mr Paxman’s clear intention was not to discuss why Breivik had run amok, or how such an atrocity could be prevented in the UK, but simply to associate — by any dishonest means possible — Tommy Robinson and the EDL with Breivik.

It was hopelessly one-sided. The gurning, grimacing Paxman went down all sorts of disingenuous trails in his quest to expose Mr Robinson and the EDL as being somehow complicit in the actions of Breivik, but was bulldozed by the unflappable and indefatigable Tommy Robinson who took Paxman apart by utilising a number of things in his possession which Paxman had rather foolishly neglected to bring with him. Memo to Mr Paxman, they are called truth, facts and reality. Poor old Paxo, who admits to knowing little about Islam, was publicly shamed and ritually stuffed.

But his humiliation is no cause for celebration. The result of the interview is to a measure irrelevant; it was the intention of the interview which was both shameful and potentially calamitous in the way it deliberately skirted around a monumentally important issue in order to indulge in politically-driven character assassination.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

A man in Pakistan shot his six daughters to death because two of them were said to have violated the family’s honor. He was told by his son that two of this teenage daughters had had romantic relationships, so he shot all six. He told police that he was glad that he had done it, and if he had it to do over, would still do the same thing.

In other news, a crowd of Muslims violently attacked a group of Copts in a predominantly Christian village in Egypt. A number of Christian victims were hospitalized, including a pregnant woman. The proximate cause of the attack was anger among the Muslims over a bell that was recently installed in the renovated village church.

Meanwhile, House Republicans have failed to gather enough votes to pass a compromise to allow the raising of the debt limit, so a vote has still not taken place.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Diana West, Fjordman, Insubria, J-PD, Mary Abdelmassih, McR, RB, TV, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Comments are disabled for this post.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Martin Brennan is a Counterjihad volunteer who has been active in the Australian Defence League and other organizations Down Under. He is a British citizen — he was born in England — and not a native Australian.

At dawn on the 19th of July he was arrested by the police and immigration at his place of residence. The authorities claimed he was an unlawful citizen of Australia, and said they cancelled his status because he failed to fill out all the paperwork that was required for residency.

An anti-sharia demo is coming up this weekend in Sydney, but that, of course, had nothing to do with the timing of his arrest…

Mr. Brennan is still in detention, at one of the locations where asylum-seeking boat people are held. Today he sent out the following message to his friends and supporters in Australia. The “serving of certain foods” mentioned by his lawyer refers to the fact that he was given a choice between halal and vegetarian — in other words, no food fit for a normal Australian:

Hello to all you great people out there who have supported me during this difficult time.

Just to let you know, I am still being detained UNLAWFULLY by the Australian Immigration department.

Below is a media release from my lawyer, Robert Balzola. He is one of the finest in the business, and if it wasn’t for this gentleman I would be back in England by now.

Media Release

Mr Martin Brennan was detained by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship on 19 July 2011 on grounds that he had no valid visa, had allegedly breached conditions on visa and general alleged non compliance with the Migration Act of Australia.

On 25 July 2011 Mr Brennan applied for a bridging visa on grounds that he is eligible to apply for a further spouse visa upon release from Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre where Mr Brennan is presently detained.

Mr Brennan is a British citizen.

On 26 July 2011 Mr Brennan was refused his bridging visa on grounds that “Schedule 1 Item 1214C(3)(h)(ii) provides that where s48 of the Act applies to an applicant (the statutory bar provision), they are ineligible to make a valid application if they have had a Partner class visa refused since they last entered Australia”.

Mr Brennan did apply for a spouse visa on 4 November 2008 which was refused on 17 March 2010. Mr Brennan says that this occurred when correspondence was sent to an address in which he has recently moved. Mr Brennan says that he had also provided E-mail and telephone numbers to the Department for contact. Mr Brennan says no alternative contact was made.

On 26 July 2011 solicitor for Mr Brennan, Robert Balzola did notify the Department that the basis for the bridging visa refusal, being Item 1214C(3)(h)(ii) has been removed by Statutory Legislative Instrument SLI No. 105 of 2011 effective 1 July 2011. Mr Balzola further advised that the effect of SLI 105 is to remove Schedule 1 Item 1214C(3)(h) in its entirety. Mr Balzola further noted for this reasons that the bridging visa refusal was made in administrative error as the provision relied upon by the Department did not exist at time of decision.

On 26 July 2011 the Department wrote back to Mr Balzola, simply asserting: “I can advise the decision to refuse your client the Bridging Visa E (BVE) will not be revisited on this occasion. If you believe there is a jurisdictional error in this case you are entitled to seek review of this decision at the Migration Review Tribunal”.

On 27 July 2011 Mr Balzola wrote to the Department in reply, seeking reasons for the decision under s.13 of the Administrative Decisions Judicial Review Act.

Today, the Department notified Mr Balzola that this matter was now with the Department’s Legal Branch for consideration.

Also today, Mr Balzola has brought this matter to the attention of the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship for resolution.

It is the intention of the applicant to seek the original decision be vacated being fundamentally flawed at law.

Mr Brennan has further complained with full justification against his mistreatment against his medical condition and the serving of certain foods.

More from Martin Brennan:

Now to explain this in more simple terms, the Australian Immigration Department (DIAC) have slapped a statutory 8 bar on me which is item 1214c(3) (h) (ii). This prevents me from making an application for a bridging visa; or any visa for this matter.

This legislation was cancelled on the 1st of July 2011. I have been informed by my lawyer that as I am of good character, I would not be refused a bridging visa, so as they are detaining me now under legislation that doesn’t exist any more. I am being held in detention UNLAWFULLY.

We posted a couple of weeks ago about the appearance of “shariah-controlled zone” posters in the Waltham Forest area of East London. There was some speculation in the comments on that post about whether these posters were authentically Islamic, or whether they were perhaps put up by anti-jihad activists trying to discredit Muslims. And they did seem somewhat more explicitly fundamentalist than most Muslim propaganda, with the possible exception of the ravings of the notorious firebrand Anjem Choudary.

Shortly after our first-hand report appeared, a British tabloid published an article with a photo of a Muslim putting up similar shariah-zone stickers in public places. That article, however, mysteriously disappeared from the web not long afterwards.

Now The Daily Mail has published an article with photos of the same young man and his stickers. According to the Mail, Anjem Choudary is indeed the man behind the campaign:

‘No Porn or Prostitution’: Islamic Extremists Set Up Sharia Law Controlled Zones in British Cities

By Rebecca Camber

Islamic extremists have launched a poster campaign across the UK proclaiming areas where Sharia law enforcement zones have been set up.

Communities have been bombarded with the posters, which read: ‘You are entering a Sharia-controlled zone — Islamic rules enforced.’

The bright yellow messages daubed on bus stops and street lamps have already been seen across certain boroughs in London and order that in the ‘zone’ there should be ‘no gambling’, ‘no music or concerts’, ‘no porn or prostitution’, ‘no drugs or smoking’ and ‘no alcohol’.

Hate preacher Anjem Choudary has claimed responsibility for the scheme, saying he plans to flood specific Muslim and non-Muslim communities around the UK and ‘put the seeds down for an Islamic Emirate in the long term’.

In the past week, dozens of streets in the London boroughs of Waltham Forest, Tower Hamlets and Newham have been targeted, raising fears that local residents may be intimidated or threatened for flouting ‘Islamic rules’

In response to last night’s post about the psychopathy of Anders Behring Breivik, our longtime reader and commenter Blogger sent these brief observations on the apparent mental state of the killer:

People who don’t work in mental health have no idea how “normal” psychopaths (as well as irrational people) can present.

I work as a mental health nurse and we sometimes get patients who have written long narratives about various beliefs and philosophies. Their manuscripts are often included in their medical record, and the professionals read them to get background on the patient.

To the untrained observer, these people can come across as incredibly sane, often displaying even more developed ideas that we thought our own were. Those inexperienced in treating the mentally ill may wonder about their own sanity. But we nurses are used to it.

This Norwegian killer was your typical psychopath, and since they are often good-looking and intelligent, people also assume psychopaths are ‘rational’. But the actions of this psychopath are both evil and irrational. It makes no sense, logically, to advance a political stance by presenting it as evil.

An Islamic terrorist, on the other hand, is instructed by his or her highest authority, Allah, and the examples of Muhammad, whose actions Muslims are told to emulate. They are brainwashed.

Therefore the actions of a terrorist carrying out the commands of Allah are evil, but rational.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

The IMF and European leaders are concerned about the stalemate in the U.S. government over the debt limit, and are exhorting House leaders and President Obama to get down to business and hammer out an agreement. The IMF fears the consequences for world financial markets if a deal is not reached by the August 2 deadline, and the United States begins defaulting on its debts.

In other news, five Somali pirates are on trial in the Netherlands, and may receive prison sentences of up to ten years if they are convicted.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, Erick Stakelbeck, Fjordman, Gaia, Insubria, TV, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Anders Behring Breivik is now commonly referred to as “deranged”, “insane”, “crazy”, a “madman”, a “lunatic”, etc. These descriptives are an attempt to put last week’s events in Norway into a context that makes sense to the rest of us, but they are misnomers: based on the available evidence, he is a psychopath.

A psychopath is not clinically insane. He is quite rational, often more rational and lucid than most people. He is able to stay calmly focused on his goals over a long period of time. His behavior is not erratic or capricious.

His reasoning and methodology are not impaired, but that does not mean he is not mentally ill. What makes the psychopath abnormal are his goals, which are to varying degrees violent, destructive, depraved, monstrous, and inhuman. His focused lucidity is directed towards deeds that lie beyond the pale of our common humanity.

The psychopath’s world contains nothing but himself, and all his actions are informed by a grandiosity that culminates in massive, murderous, bloodthirsty deeds that will glorify him forever in history, as presented on the stage of his own mind.

Dr. Michael Welner is a Canadian forensic psychiatrist, and in the video below he discusses the non-insanity of Anders Behring Breivik. He doesn’t employ the terms “psychopath” or “psychopathy”, but his take on the mind of the killer is similar.

We have just discovered what may well be two comments by Anders Behring Breivik at Gates of Vienna. They were both posted in 2008, the first in a September post and the second in an October post.

The reason I failed to find them earlier is that he used the profile name “year2183”, and all my earlier searches had been for combinations using “2083”, which was the year he used in his manifesto and other writings.

Based on the general style and subject matter, these two comments certainly sound like Mr. Breivik. The views expressed in them were not out of the ordinary for Gates of Vienna commenters, and there was obviously no indication of the murderous attacks he planned to carry out three years later.

You’ll notice his focus on deportation — which, as regular readers know, is not a position this blog supports — and he chides Fjordman for his unwillingness to discuss the topic. As Daniel Pipes points out, Mr. Breivik believed Dr. Pipes, Fjordman, Bat Ye’or, and other Counterjihad writers were “scared to propagate a conservative revolution and armed resistance”, and that was why they did not want to talk about “the D word”.

Below are the two comments from this blog that may have been written by Anders Behring Breivik. The original texts have not been edited:

Now that Fjordman is no longer giving interviews to the media, some of the European outlets have written wanting to interview me.

I will give no interviews to the European media, for the reasons given in the statement below, which is being sent out in reply to all reporters who request such interviews.

If you read anything in the European press purporting to be my words, and it differs in any way from the text below (with the exception of the alternate words in square brackets), then it has been edited before publication by someone other than myself.

I have access to translated summaries of every European news story on Breivik and the Oslo murders, and of course I can read the English-language articles myself. I am well aware of what is being said in the newspapers and on television about me, Fjordman, and many other colleagues.

It is astonishing how much bad information, innuendo, rumor published as fact, unsourced articles, character assassination, and outright lies are being published in Europe today. The lack of ethical behavior among professional journalists is absolutely appalling.

Because I attended some of the events described, and know many of the people involved, I can see how bad the reporting is. The slanders and the smears are obvious. Unlike your [readers] [viewers], I am cognizant of the truth.

Given these conditions, there is no way that I will consent to be interviewed by anyone in the European press.

However, you have my permission to publish this email, provided that you publish it in its entirety, with no omissions or alterations, in the original English.

We all know that the mainstream media have a double standard when it comes to political ideology. If you are a conservative — or even worse, a nationalist — you are held to a different standard than that applied to progressives and socialists. Those are just the rules of the game, and it’s been that way for a long time.

The double standard was glaringly revealed when the reading preferences of the man who confessed to committing last week’s atrocities in Norway were revealed. Anyone holding the wrong political opinions — especially “Islamophobic” ones — was held indirectly responsible for the murder of all those innocent people. None of those so implicated had ever supported or advocated violence, yet their writings were deemed to be an “inspiration” for the killer.

Many thanks to our Washington correspondent Frontinus for discovering an example of the other side of this double standard: a television program which the Oslo murderer loved, and which glorified a depraved serial killer. The same program has already inspired other successful murderers — so where is the liberal outrage?

The silence is deafening.

Norway Mass Murder: The Dexter Factorby Frontinus

The appalling killing in Norway, and its purported justification via a 1500 page “compendium” by the mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik under the pseudonym “Andrew Berwick,” has let loose a remarkably well-coordinated campaign against any intellectuals who have opposed Islamisation or jihadists in Europe, a campaign pursued with meticulous precision by the New York Times, the leftwing blogs and the European press, executed against political leaders (Wilders, Merkel, Cameron, Sarkozy et al), against authors of books and opeds and essays, against human rights activists, anyone who has written or acted against violent jihad or the imposition of the violent doctrines of Shariah in western nations.

But no one is talking about the Dexter Factor, which is this: “Andrew Berwick” liked the Dexter cable series about a ruthless and completely deceptive serial killer.

A ruthless and completely deceptive killer, a narrator detailing his murderous plans, proud of his clever ability to escape detection.

“Andrew Berwick” didn’t just watch Dexter, he found it “hilarious.” He wrote: “I am currently watching Dexter, the series about that forensic mass murderer. Quite hilarious. I’m also looking forward to watch the new movie-series about Carlos the Jackal (the Marxist-Islamist and Che wannabe scumbag).” He mentioned Dexter a second time in a list of other television programs he likes, a fanboy mixing explosives chatting about his viewing habits.

The Dexter series is about a forensic analyst for the Miami Police Department, on the surface a mild-mannered and psychopathically deceptive lab technician, secretly a serial killer. A brutal, methodical, self-justifying serial killer. The Dexter series is dedicated to glamorizing serial killing, with a focus on the mechanics of execution. A show explicitly and unashamedly glamorizing evil, justifying evil, and training in the specific operations of evil. With, of course, the occasional post-modern ironic, self-referential moment of doubt, to make it all a bit more socially acceptable.

No shaming for Dexter’s author, directors, actors, producers, advertisers. No shaming for them for being cited in “Berwick’s” compendium, no stern demands for censorship from the New York Times or the always trendy European media.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

There are several articles tonight featuring interesting details about the accused Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, aspects of the case that were not covered in the initial MSM rush to blame his heinous acts on Fjordman, Gates of Vienna, Jihad Watch, and other anti-jihad sites.

In other news, the small town of Mugardos on the coast of Galicia has now completed the first three months of an experiment: merchants in the town have been accepting the old currency, the peseta, in parallel with the euro. Overall, the use of the peseta has been a success — so many people had the old banknotes and coins stashed away in their cookie jars and under their mattresses that currency once again became viable, especially as the euro seemed on the verge of collapse.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Insubria, JD, Mary Abdelmassih, TV, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

This post is closed to comments.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

The brutal murder of dozens of innocent Norwegian civilians several days ago has shocked the Freedom Party (Dutch PVV). We mourn and stand by the Norwegian people who suffer from a massive blow.

The manifesto of the perpetrator makes clear that this is a madman. He wants to work with Al Qaeda (which he cherishes great admiration for), craves the bombing of cities, dreams of knights that surgically mutilate themselves, and wants to meet his hero Karadzic.

Breivik also refers to the Netherlands. That the fight against Islam is violently abused by a psychopath is disgusting and a slap in the face of the global anti-Islamic movement. It fills me with disgust that the perpetrator refers to the PVV and me in his manifesto.

Neither PVV nor I are responsible for a lone idiot who twisted and violently abused the freedom-loving anti-Islamization ideals, no matter how much some people would like that. We are democrats at heart. The Freedom Party has never, ever called for violence and will never do. We believe in the power of the ballot box and the wisdom of the voter. Not bombs and guns.

We fight for a democratic and nonviolent means against the further Islamisation of society and will continue to do so. The preservation of our freedom and security is our only goal.

Our Austrian correspondent Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, whom regular readers know well, has been pulled into the controversy over the recent atrocities in Norway. In response to numerous media requests, Elisabeth has decided to make the following statement, which will be her only one.

Below is her own translation into English. The original German is below the translation.

In English:

APA AussendungElisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, M.A.

Statement

I condemn in the strongest possible terms the terror attacks that took place in Oslo and on Utøya island on July 23, 2011. There are no excuses for this wicked atrocity, nor can it be relativized. I extend my sympathies to the Norwegian people and especially to the relatives and friends of the dead. I mourn with the survivors.

I very much regret that this psychopathic killer believed he had to make reference to my beliefs in his 1,500-page manifesto. I can hardly defend myself against such wrongful exploitation, but those who know me and hear what I say in my public appearances know very well that I reject any form of violence.

However, if well-founded criticism is blamed for those attacks, aren’t the critics of Olof Palme to blame for his murder?

Did Mahatma Gandhi’s critics kill him, or did the killer himself bear individual responsibility?

Were the critics of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy to blame for the murder of the crown prince, and consequently responsible for the outbreak of World War I?

I am a woman of words, and I have nothing to do with violence, which I categorically reject.

In addition, I reject all worldviews that justify the use of violence. In this rejection, I do not care whether the ideology commands its power with the help of guns or swords.

Note: Fjordman has included both English and Norwegian versions of the text.

In English:

I am still getting many emails from journalists. Yes, if you send emails to this website I do normally get them. I may choose to answer a few journalists directly and have already done so, but some others will be answered indirectly via this website. I hope you understand that I do not want to make my email address public.

I was not involved in these senseless murders in any way, and have nothing to hide, but I am so swamped right now that I cannot promise that I will answer everybody. It’s beyond my personal capacity to do so. I will answer as many as I can in English or in Norwegian, the only languages I know well enough to write in.

I would like to thank those who sent me so many support emails, from Australia to Israel. I greatly appreciate it, and I am sorry that I cannot thank all of you directly. I hope we can eventually return to doing what this website normally does, which is to post essays on important subjects, some of them controversial, others not so much. But for right now the attention focused on this website is so unusual that we have to deal with that issue first.

Comments will still be closed for the time being. We apologize to regular readers for this, but hope you understand the situation.

I want to emphasize a few important points. According to what has been reported in the mass media, Anders Behring Breivik started planning his barbaric attacks as far back as 2002. That was before Robert Spencer had started his website Jihad Watch.

The very first post I ever wrote under the name Fjordman was in February 2005. It is still available online on my old blog and can be easily verified by anybody who wants to. This also means that this horrible man had been planning mass murder for years before he had read even a single word I had ever written.

I’d just like to point that out.

I would also like to point out that hundreds of thousands of people from Canada to India have read my essays over the years, and to my knowledge not a single one of them has killed so much as a sparrow as a result of doing so.

I have read about the unspeakable things Anders Behring Breivik did at Utøya. Any person doing such a thing is a monster. He murdered dozens of people in cold blood and injured countless others, mentally or physically. That’s bad enough, and it will take years for those wounds to heal, if they ever do.

It is irresponsible in this situation to try to expand his list of victims even further, from hundreds to hundreds of millions of people, by exploiting this atrocity to shut down vital political debates about immigration, Multiculturalism, or Islam in multiple countries. It cannot be allowed to happen.

That monster has already executed many people. He should not be allowed to execute political freedom in the Western world as well.

Monday, July 25, 2011

An Italian soldier was killed in Afghanistan today, and the death has caused debate in Italy about the advisability of a continuing Italian military presence in Afghanistan. The leaders of Lega Nord have expressed their desire to reduce significantly the number of troops in Afghanistan by the end of this year.

In other news, initial reports that an accomplice of accused mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik was arrested in Poland have now been denied by the Polish government. Earlier reports had indicated that the owner of a chemical company had been arrested for helping Breivik obtain materials he used in his explosives. Now the Polish authorities say no one was arrested.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Caroline Glick, CSP, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Update: Andrew Gilligan, a columnist for The Telegraph — whom I used to consider semi-friendly towards our cause — published an op-ed today entitled “The British far-Right is nothing but a rabble”. The column is not really worth excerpting from, but a comment left on the article is far better than anything Mr. Gilligan says.

The commenter, pjwholland, is referring to this sentence by Mr. Gilligan:

The English Defence League, although vile, shows the British far Right’s weakness, not its strength.

Carl in Jerusalem has fisked another New York Times ‘report’. Accurately, he titles his post “A Boost for the Islamists”. Indeed it is.

Back in the day, the Times were also big boosters of the Big Lie. Their record has been blackened more than once since Duranty ruled in Moscow. Just google the search string [New York Times makes stuff up]; enjoy those 380 million hits, including gems like this. He traces the jornolist lies back to 1905, proving yet again the Old Grey Doxy has earned her sordid rep.

Carl says:

The Norwegian terror attacks have turned into an excuse to beat up on conservative, anti-Islamist bloggers. In a disgraceful piece written this morning, the New York Times all but blames Robert Spencer, Baron Bodissey and Pam Geller for the Oslo attacks.

Indeed. They smear us around like jelly on their toasted hate. As usual their fact-checkers were out to lunch (eating those hate burgers, no doubt) when their Jimmy Olsen jornolist put this up — and Carl quotes him:

The Gates of Vienna, a blog that ordinarily keeps up a drumbeat of anti-Islamist news and commentary, closed its pages to comments Sunday “due to the unusual situation in which it has recently found itself.”

Its operator, who describes himself as a Virginia consultant and uses the pseudonym “Baron Bodissey,” wrote on the site Sunday that “at no time has any part of the Counterjihad advocated violence.”

Had they bothered to check, our “operator” is fully out in the open at Big Peace and has been for some time. In fact, he published a post there under his own name reporting the rape on the steps of Parliament in Oslo last Friday. Ironically, he was putting up that horror story (of the Norwegian girl whose rape was watched by Norwegian security guards) not long before those truck bombs were exploding.

Were this NYT reporter any less ignorant, he might have recognized the Baron’s nic from Jack Vance’s oeuvre. Were he any better-read, he might have known that the so-called “operator’s” avatar was Otto von Bismarck. Is the subtle irony over the heads of these big city jornolists? Too bad no one taught them basic research nearly as well as they learned advanced innuendo.

As most readers know by now, Gates of Vienna has experienced a massive surge of traffic in the last few days, thanks to the manifesto written by Anders Behring Breivik, the accused murderer of seventy-six people in Oslo and on the island of Utøya.

The increased traffic forced us to close our blog to comments, since they became too numerous and contentious to monitor. It also brought a vast flood of emails, the full quantity of which we are having difficulty reading, much less responding to.

Yesterday Fjordman welcomed new readers from Der Spiegel and Dagbladet. Later in the day he could have added Aftenposten to the list. Then late last night The New York Times surprised us by deigning to take notice of our existence.

The New York Times has traditionally been nicknamed “The Old Grey Lady”, but it seems the lady may be getting a bit long in the tooth, perhaps even moving into her dotage. Her reporting on the Oslo incident reflects what we have long come to expect from the paper: it gives a not-so-subtle push to help readers reach the conclusion that “anti-Islamic” websites and writers indirectly caused the carnage in Norway.

This is what one of her reporters, a man named Steven Erlanger, wrote about us yesterday:

Mr. Breivik was said by analysts to have been an occasional commenter on a blog, Gates of Vienna, which is topped by these words: “At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war.”

Well, at least he quoted our masthead right — I’ll give him that.

But the assertion that Mr. Breivik had commented here is, as far as I can determine, not true.

I don’t know who the NYT hires to be its “analysts”, but we have our own team, the guys I call “the Scandinavian Gang of Five” — Fjordman, Henrik, Reinhard, Kitman, and KGS. Collectively they are fluent in English, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, German, and several other European languages. Their own contacts give them an additional reach into events throughout Scandinavia.

All in all, I’d say that’s a pretty good team of analysts.

On Saturday morning I asked for their help in finding the customary screen names used by Anders Behring Breivik in his postings around various Scandinavian websites. There were four or five altogether, and I searched our comment archives for any instances of those names or their close variants. As far as I could tell, there were none to be found. If Mr. Breivik hung out here, he must have used a different nickname.

The fact that the Times’ “analysts” had said the purported killer had commented here prompted me to email the reporter and ask him for the screen name under which Mr. Breivik had commented at Gates of Vienna, and also the names and credentials of the “analysts” who determined this fact.

That was last night, and Mr. Erlanger has not replied to my email as of post time. What’s more, the Times’ article was updated this morning and reposted at a new URL for today’s edition, with the identical paragraph about GoV included intact.

Thus it is only proper to publish a copy of the email I sent to the NYT last night:

Note: For readers who missed the announcement earlier today, this blog has been closed to comments until further notice.

Update: This post has been bumped. For regular readers, the July 24 news feed is below this post, in its normal place.

We have unusual traffic to this website right now because of the massacres that took place in the Oslo region this Friday, July 22. Apparently, the person who is currently suspected of having committed these atrocities and murdered nearly one hundred people in cold blood, Anders Behring Breivik, has quoted me and this website in a book he has published.

It is only fair in this situation that I publish some of my thoughts about this horrible weekend, one of the worst my small nation has experienced in a long time. I know there are journalists trying to get in touch with me at the moment, but I cannot answer everybody, nor do I want to. I may publish more texts in the coming week as well but let us start with this. I normally write for an international audience, but since this incident involved Norwegian victims and a Norwegian perpetrator I will also include the same text in Norwegian, after the English one.

In English:

No, I have never met Anders Behring Breivik in my life. He doesn’t even know what I look like.

No, I had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the massacres that took place on Friday in central Oslo and at Utøya. I was nowhere near the scene. I was planning to go and watch a movie at a local cinema with a family member when I got a message that a massive explosion had rocked central Oslo. From that moment on, I was liveblogging along with nearly a dozen different people at Gates of Vienna until after the assumed shooter had been caught at Utøya.

How did I react to the events I witnessed this afternoon? With absolute horror and disgust, just like everybody else did. I admit that I thought at first we were dealing with an Islamic Jihadist attack, which seemed to be confirmed by the claims of some Islamic organizations that they were behind it. But the shootings at Utøya did not seem to follow the usual Jihadist pattern, and as the evening went by it slowly became clear that we were dealing with something else, and possibly something even more horrifying. Whoever committed those unspeakable atrocities is a monster and deserves just as little pity as he gave to his innocent, unarmed victims.

How do I feel about knowing that the assumed perpetrator of these atrocities has quoted me in his much-talked about book? Absolutely terrible. What else can I say? I must stress that I have not yet read his very long book or manifest and I have neither the time nor the stomach to do so at the present time. I can only refer to the bits and pieces of it quoted in various news articles and what others keep telling me. He has apparently quoted a great many texts from a variety of public sources, one of them being me. His total lack of respect for human life is not, however, something he can have picked up from me, or from any of the other Islam-critical writers I know such as Robert Spencer or Bat Ye’or. Indeed, the lack of respect for human life is often one of the great shortcomings of Islamic culture that we have consistently pointed out.

I have also never called for violence in any of my essays, and I would estimate that I have published between one million and two million words under this name on the Internet. I honestly don’t know myself, I lost track years ago. These essays are not hidden. They are all out in the open on the Internet and can be found by anybody with access to a search engine. I have nothing to hide, as far as I am concerned. I write about subjects ranging from astrophysics to the history of chocolate and beer, but I also write about sensitive and controversial topics, and I know it. We cannot stop writing about charged but important issues. People like me have been warning against rising ethnic tensions for years, not creating them. They have been created by runaway mass immigration to Western countries, and as long as that runaway immigration continues, I fear that these tensions are going to continue to rise as well. I do not wish this; I am merely warning that this is likely to happen.

Am I an extremist? I admit that I have a strong dedication to truth. Of that, I am guilty. For instance, I notice that virtually nobody talked about “moderate Islam” versus “radical Islam” or “Islamism” until very recently. Why is that? And although nearly all the major newspapers, TV stations and leading politicians throughout the Western world assure us daily that there is a huge difference between moderate and radical Islam, few if any of them seem able to explain exactly what that difference consists of. I find that strange, and I’m not the only one.

Does pointing this out make me very extreme? Perhaps. But then how do you explain that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Prime Minister of NATO member state Turkey, has stated publicly that there is no such thing as a moderate Islam? After all, he’s a very, very moderate Muslim man in charge of a very, very moderate Muslim country where Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf was a bestseller as late as in 2005. I know how moderate Erdogan is because Western leaders always remind us of this fact. So if this exceptionally moderate man says that there is no such thing as a moderate Islam, surely he is worth listening to?

The most extreme thing I did this weekend was sleep barely at all for two nights in a row, first of all because of the horrible events I had just witnessed, which deeply affected me, but also because of false rumors that circulated in several countries for days that this man who massacred nearly 100 persons was me. I have been in the blogging business for a few years now and have been through some public fights along the way, but I have never before been accused of being the worst mass murderer in Scandinavian history. That’s a first even for me, and I sincerely hope there won’t be a second time. I’m a normal human being and did not particularly enjoy this. The second-most extreme thing I have done this weekend is watching an old movie, drinking Pinot noir red wine from New Zealand and reading a book about medieval history. This happens to be the most extreme thing I do on any average weekend.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

There are several interesting items from WorldNet Daily on the Oslo massacre that cast a new light on some of the events. It’s too early to tell for certain, but the initial media “narrative” may not hold up much longer.

In other news, the Egyptian military will not allow international election observers into the country for the September elections. Meanwhile, Islamic authorities in Malaysia have refused to allow the word “Allah” to be used by Christians as the word for “God”.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

A reminder: Gates of Vienna is closed to comments for the time being.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.